


Tend to Your Garden

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [49]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Confusion, Emotional Infidelity, Infidelity, Knotting, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-20 23:06:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14903898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: His body remembers before he does, understands why he’s stretched out on his side in Tony’s bed. Why the room feels unfamiliar but the air smells like him, like them.





	Tend to Your Garden

**Author's Note:**

> Now with a beginning, middle, and end--though I fear it's not a happy one.

When he wakes up, he can feel Tony’s eyes on him, lasers cutting through the dark. Tony’s hand is on him, too, a pleasant weight on his left hip, the thumb turning idle over the scars there. Ancient history.

“Just so you know,” Tony says, his voice like sandpaper, “you didn’t kill me.”

“Was I trying?”

Tony makes a warm, amused sound. “Nah. But the fourth or fifth time you made me come, I might’ve felt like I was dying. In the best possible way.”

His body remembers before he does, groks why he’s stretched out on his side in Tony’s bed. Why the room feels unfamiliar but the air smells like him, like them. Why his knot aches. Why he turns across the thin stretch of space between them and takes back that beautiful mouth, the clever one that he’d learned how to silence with his tongue and his cock and his own kind of need, driven less by his own biology than by his desire to see Tony happy, than knowing the man was content. 

He isn’t sure why it'd seemed so important. He only knew that it had.

 “Sweetheart,” Tony says with a sigh. “Yeah. Hi. Come here.”

He slides into Bucky’s arms like he belongs there and after last night, Bucky thinks, turning an arm around Tony tight, maybe he does.

Except this isn’t his bed. It’s not a place he belongs, that he’d ever imagined himself. This is Steve’s pillow he’s resting on, Steve’s side of the bed. This is Steve’s mate who’s crawling on top of him, who’s making soft, hot sounds as they kiss, who’s damp already and shifting his hips against Bucky’s cock, aiming for more.

“C’mon,” Tony breathes. “C’mon, Buck. Wake up.”

“Plenty awake,” Bucky says.

“Then why aren’t you inside me?”

Bucky catches his ass, pets at the swell of it. “Haven’t you had enough?” 

“No, alpha,” Tony says. “Fuck no. Never.”

Everything in Bucky’s body is awake now, all the parts of himself he doesn’t like, doesn’t trust, the ones driven not by reason or logical choices but by hardwired biology and lust. He should be tossing Tony off of him. He should be leaving. He should be alone right now in his own, cold bed. Steve should be the one under Tony right now, the one whose body offers the only answers to Tony’s wilding hormones, the ones that are telling him he has to be full all the time.

That’s who Tony really wants, he tells himself, spreading his thighs and nudging Tony back so the man can take a little of what he wants, can rub himself against Bucky’s cock, work himself a little closer to the edge.

Last night, Tony’d drop kicked them both over it, but this time, Bucky was gonna have some say over how hard they fell.

It wasn’t his fault Steve was gone, trapped somewhere across the world by obligation and an over-inflated sense of his own goddamn importance. He can read a calendar, for crying out loud; he must have known what he might be skipping out on Yes, he’s Bucky best friend and yes, he’s a goddamn superhero, but what the hell had Steve been thinking, leaving his mate, the man he loves, in the lurch like this, hurting and needing and alone?

Tony had called Bucky just before midnight, eyes wide and face the color of strawberries.

“Please,” he’d said. “Bucky, please. Come up here. I’m begging.”

“I can’t,” Bucky had said a dozen times, more. “That’s not how this works. Call Steve. If he knows you need him, he’ll come.”

“I _tried_ ,” Tony spat, his expression all at once stone. “Don’t you think I fucking tried, Barnes? He won’t answer. Or he’s not picking up.” He’d leaned into the camera, the image going fuzzy at the edges. “It’s just for the night. Just until this passes. Come up and fuck me and help me burn this shit away, alpha. Please.”

They weren’t friends, he and Tony. They barely spoke. Nearly a year he’d been back in the land of the living, housed in the compound, and before last night, they’d said maybe ten words to each other outside of a mission. There was no need for anything more. They had no connection outside of Steve, beyond a shared sense of grief and unequal shares in the same guilt. When Tony looked at Bucky, his eyes always seemed fixed on Bucky’s hands like he could still see his mother’s blood there, could see those fingers wrapped around Howard’s neck. In all that time, they’d never been alone together because when they were forced to interact, there was Steve. There was always Steve.

Hell, it spoke to how desperate Tony was that he’d reached out to Bucky at all.

What excuse did Bucky have for going up, then, for closing himself in the elevator and watching the numbers tick up, every floor another step closer to a man who hated him, who needed him, the shelter of his body, until the wilds of heat gave way to sense again?

_None_ , he’d thought as the last number turned over, as the car slid to a silent stop. He had none.

_Tend to your garden_ , _Steve_ , Bucky thinks, trailing his fingers over the soft, wet clench of Tony’s opening. _Or the flowers may bloom without you_. 

Tony presses back into the touch, his eyes sinking shut, his body canting to find Bucky’s fingers. He’s still spread open and soft from the bloom of Bucky’s knot. Three times, he’d asked Bucky to knot him; three times he’d whined and thrown his head back, shown off the long line of his throat, Steve’s mark shining there, wine dark and bold. And more than three times he’d come like that, interlaced, had given his spunk up to the sheets, to Bucky’s hand, to his own. 

Bucky was the closest knot, he knew that, the next best thing to Steve. Just a substitute. But in the throes of it all, the screech drowning howl of Tony’s heat, the way it messed with Bucky’s senses, he hadn’t cared one damn bit. All that mattered was that Tony needed and Bucky could give and that was all. Plenty. Enough. 

But now his head’s clearer and Tony’s seems to be, too. The three-alarm heat of the wilds have eased, leeched the tension from Tony’s body, from his face. So why are they still touching? Why is Bucky slowly sliding his finger into Tony’s ass, the barest pressure pushed into shivering, aching skin? Why is Tony staring at him, sleepy and wicked, and arching his back? Why is Tony trying so hard to get more? Why is Bucky still willing to give?

“I love it when you touch me,” Tony says from somewhere down deep, somewhere full and fathom and five. “It’s like I can feel it in my bones, baby. Like you’re lighting me up from inside. Like I’ve been waiting my whole life for your spark.” 

“I have no idea what the hell you’re saying,” Bucky says, feeding Tony another finger, a good solid twist. “And neither do you.”

“Mmmm, fuck, of course I do. God, do that again.”

Bucky turns his wrist and Tony groans, his chest running flush. “See?” Bucky says, quiet. “That’s the last of your heat talking. You come for me one more time and you’ll have used it all up, sweetheart. No more fever. No more wilds.” 

“No more you.”

Something in Bucky sinks, a hint of quiet and cold. “‘Course not,” he says. “You won’t need me.”

Tony’s eyes are coal, the color lost to the black, and his mouth’s halfway open, the slick on Bucky’s fingers hotter now and thick. “The fuck I won’t, Barnes.”

“Yeah, right. Come on.”

“I _will_ ,” Tony says. “Fuck you, I will. I just won’t have you. That’s the thing.”

Bucky shivers. “Please,” he says, not sure what he’s asking for. Not sure what it is anymore that he needs. “Tony, please don’t.”

Tony cants his body up in this beautiful, trembling arch and lifts himself off of Bucky’s fingers, sits up on his knees, presses them hard against Bucky’s hips. “Haven’t you noticed the way I look at you?” he says. “The way I can’t talk right when you’re around? The way my goddamn mouth goes stupidly silent? You haven’t, have you?”

Their cocks brush and for a moment, all Bucky can see are stars. “No,” he gets out, “I haven’t.”

Tony catches Bucky’s wrist and lifts Bucky’s hand to his mouth. Suckles the slick there, smears his tongue with his own heat. “I stare at your hands,” he says, slurry. “All the time. I stare at your hands and I think about where I want them, where I’d beg you to put them if we were alone. The places that ache for your touch.”

There’s a roar in Bucky’s head, a sandstorm that eats up the sun, and it hurts, how much he wants to be inside Tony. How hard he is, how hungry. How hot. “I thought you, I thought, ah, fuck, I thought you saw blood there, on my hands. I thought that’s why you kept looking at them. Why you never said two words to me, I thought--”

“Yeah, you did some bad shit,” Tony says, turning the words into Bucky’s palm. “Worse than bad. Destructive. You were HYDRA’s fucking wrecking ball. And I hated you for it, when you first came back, when they had you in stasis. When you were still half-you and half-theirs. Because I decrypted all of their shit, did you know that? Laid it out, your body count, stared at it in black and white. It was ugly, Barnes. So fucking ugly.” A bite to the heel of his hand, a flash of last night’s furor. “But the thing is, when you came to the compound, when you were _you_ again, god, I could totally see it, the good that was still inside you. Sometimes I think you’re made up of shadows of the man you used to be, the one Steve never shuts up about, maybe, but you still care. All the evil they made you do and you’re still a force for good. You know how incredible that is? All of that they put you through and somehow, you’re still you. And fuck, that’s beautiful, Buck. You are.” 

A shift of his hips, a shove, and he makes Tony take him, slams inside without any warning, and Tony shouts, a sharp, searing sound.

“Please.” That word again. He’s still not sure what it means, what he needs. “Tony. Please.”

Tony’s hands are on his chest, braced, and he’s shaking, his slick dripping from the place where they’re joined. “I want to ride you,” he says through clenched teeth. “I want to ride you until you come in me, alpha. Can I?”

Bucky’s head falls back and the sound that comes out is half howl, half groan. “Yes. Fuck, yes, baby. Yes.”

They fuck slow this time, slow, so slow. Bucky lays back and lets Tony set the pace, lets him trace every line of Bucky’s body he can reach and devour every curve with his palms.

“You feel so good,” Tony says, almost reverent. “You don’t even know, Buck. You feel so fucking good.”

He strokes Tony’s thighs, pulled tight with tension, and when Tony asks, Bucky plays with his cock, teasing the head, squeezing the shaft, feeling Tony get closer and closer, the wet stretch of him quaking.

“That’s right,” Bucky murmurs, lifting his hips to meet Tony’s. “That’s right, sweetheart. Come on. Let me have it.” 

When Tony comes, it’s like a lightning strike, swift and unexpected, a scorch, but it’s the smell of him, searing and bright, that pops Bucky’s knot, gets up him tucked up tight inside of Tony’s body, has him giving Tony everything he has left, every last breath. Everything.

 

*****

 

“I think I’m in love with you,” Tony says later in the afternoon sunlight, the vestiges of the real world creeping in from behind the blinds and spilling uneven over the bed. 

They’re sitting side by side on the end, shoulders brushing. Tony’s hand is on Bucky’s knee and Bucky’s rests on Tony’s back, stroking the sadness he can feel gathered there, soothing. 

“I wish to god that I didn’t feel this way,” Tony says. “It doesn’t make any goddamn sense, I know. It's inconvenient and unfair and it fucking stings. But I do.”

Bucky leans over and kisses Tony one last time, slow and deliberate and sweet. He wants to remember this, remember the shape of Tony’s mouth, the sound he makes when their tongues touch, the soft, unfevered heat of his skin. At last he draws away, presses a hand to Tony’s cheek and says: “I’m sorry.” 

Tony grabs his wrist and keeps Bucky’s hand still, leans against it. “Bucky?” 

“Hmmm?”

“What was this, everything that just happened? Was it all alpha fucking a hard-up omega? Or was there some part of you that actually wanted _me_?”

There’s too much noise in Bucky’s head to know the answer. Too much confusion in his heart. Too much light. “I don’t know,” he says after a minute. “Honest to god, Tony. I don’t know.”

Tony’s mouth lifts, a smile that doesn’t get close to his eyes. “A draw, then,” he says. “A maybe. Ok.”

Downstairs, in Bucky’s quarters, the air seems colder, somehow. He takes a hot shower and sits down at his kitchen table and watches the birds turning out over the trees beyond the compound walls, calling to each other as they sail up towards the sun. 

For the first time in a long time, he feels acutely alone. 

He sits there for a long time, still in the afternoon quiet, until he hears the whine of the Quinjet, feels the telltale vibration in the floor. Steve, home from yet another good fight. Tony, awaiting him with open arms and an uncertain heart. He doesn’t like the picture it makes in his head. 

So he retreats to his bedroom and closes the door, the blackout shades, the great steel shutters that still hang in his mind and falls into bed. Hides from the rest of the world, from his own treacherous thoughts, in sleep.

He dreams of flowers ten feet tall and trees that block out the sky and of Tony's petal-soft mouth on his throat whispering, whispering: _A_ _lpha_.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt(s): I’ll carry the weight until the moment I break & I mean, it could've been worse. We could've been sober.  
> Prompts from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).


End file.
